Sea of Shadows

“With all due respect, Madam Secretary,” the admiral said, “it looks pretty simple from my side of the table. One of our allies has been attacked. If we don’t cover their backs, how can we expect them to cover ours?”

“I don’t dispute the fact that one of our allies has been attacked,” Secretary Kilpatrick said. “The question is which of our allies?”

“That’s pretty obvious,” the admiral said.

SecDef’s eyebrows went up. “Are you certain? Right now, we can’t even be sure who fired the first shot. What if we investigate and discover that one of the British ships launched first, and the Germans only returned fire in self-defense?”

“I suppose it’s possible,” Admiral Casey said. “But I don’t think it’s very likely.”

“You’ve been in combat before,” the secretary of defense said. “And so have I.” As a retired Army colonel, she was one of only three people in the room who had earned the right to wear the coveted Combat Infantry Badge.

“We both know how the game is played,” she said. “Some yahoo crowds your airspace, so you lock on them with fire control radar. They return the favor and paint you with their fire control radar. Before you know it, you’re both pumping enough electromagnetic energy into the air to microwave a hotdog. Alarms are going off; adrenaline levels are sky high; people are shouting. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, somebody eventually gets tired of the game and backs down. Everybody gets to go home claiming victory. But about one percent of the time, somebody gets spooked and does something stupid. Sometimes it’s one of our guys, and sometimes it’s one of their guys.”

“The Brits are claiming that the Germans shot first.”

“Of course they are,” the secretary of defense said. “In their shoes, I’d probably say the same thing, whether I’d shot first or not.”

General Gilmore nodded. “I agree. We have to table the matter of the shooting, at least until we know who initiated the attack. That still leaves us with four German submarines hauling ass through the Med. What do we do about them?”

“We can’t afford to attack them out of hand,” Undersecretary of State Mitchell said.

“We’re not going to,” the president said. “I want the Abraham Lincoln strike group to intercept them and turn them around.”

Admiral Casey tilted his head to the side. “That tactic didn’t seem to work too well for the British, sir.”

The president brought his palms together and interlaced his fingers. “A fully escorted aircraft carrier should fare slightly better than two aging British warships. I would hope so, anyway.”

General Gilmore nodded. “No doubt you are right, Mr. President. But Admiral Casey does have a point. While there’s no conclusive evidence yet, my instincts tell me that the Germans probably pulled the trigger first. What if they start shooting at us?”

“They won’t,” the president said. “Somebody just got an itchy finger. It’s not going to happen again.” He looked at the Chief of Naval Operations. “Bob, it’s your job to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. We don’t want to provoke the Germans; we just want to turn them around.”

“Understood, sir,” the CNO said. “We’ll play it low-key. But what happens if the Germans open up on us anyway?”

“Jesus Christ, Bob!” the president snapped. “Get over it, and get over it now. You’ve got your orders. We’re not going to get in a shooting war with the god-damned Republic of Germany. That is simply not an option.

It’s … it’s unthinkable.”

CHAPTER 15

TORPEDO: THE HISTORY AND EVOLUTION OF A KILLING MACHINE

_{(Excerpted from an unpublished manuscript [pages 91–95] and reprinted by permission of the author, Retired Master Chief Sonar Technician David M. Hardy, USN)}

Following the American Revolution, naval tacticians in many countries began to see the torpedo’s promise as a weapon. The torpedo still lacked a viable delivery system, but its destructive potential was nothing short of astounding.

Over the course of the next several decades, two basic design philosophies emerged. Floating torpedoes (by far the most common) were designed to drift on, or slightly below, the surface of the water until they came into contact with the hull of an enemy ship. Today, these so-called floating torpedoes would be classified as mines, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the word torpedo was understood to include nearly any form of waterborne explosive device. During the American Civil War, when Union Admiral David Farragut shouted his famous line, “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” he was referring to mines.

Spar torpedoes were second in popularity and effectiveness to floating torpedoes. A spar torpedo consisted of an explosive charge mounted on a wooden pole (or spar) and lashed to the bow of a small boat. Rigged to project several yards out in front of the bow, the spar torpedo was designed to be rammed directly against the hull of the target vessel. The resulting explosion, only a few yards from the attacking boat, would almost certainly result in damage to the torpedo boat or its crew. Understandably, spar torpedoes were unpopular weapons, and they saw very little application in combat before they fell out of use altogether.

Destructive capacity notwithstanding, the lack of a reliable delivery system severely limited the effectiveness of both spar and floating torpedo designs. It would take a major technological breakthrough to change that.

The breakthrough finally came in 1866, when a British-born naval engineer named Robert Whitehead built the first self-propelled torpedo.

Whitehead called his invention the automotive torpedo (or sometimes, the locomotive torpedo), but critics and supporters alike insisted on calling it the Whitehead torpedo. By any title, the self-propelled torpedo represented more than a technological breakthrough; it was a quantum leap in naval weaponry.

In appearance, Whitehead’s torpedo was a cigar-shaped steel cylinder with severely tapered ends. Mounted at the rear (or afterbody) of the weapon was a propeller, which was coupled by a drive shaft to a pneumatic motor inside the cylinder. Also mounted on the afterbody were a pair of horizontal fins and a pair of vertical fins, to guide the torpedo through the water in a straight line. The pneumatic motor was powered by compressed air from a tank built into the middle section of the weapon.

The nose of the weapon was dedicated to an explosive charge, the warhead. Whitehead used explosive gun cotton in most of his early warhead designs, but eventually he switched to dynamite, which was more stable and packed significantly more destructive power.

The ironclad warships of Whitehead’s day were defenseless against torpedo attacks. Designed to repel explosive shells from naval cannons, ironclads were heavily armored all the way down to the waterline. Since cannon shells could not effectively penetrate below the water, naval architects the world over agreed that it was not necessary to armor the underwater portion of a warship’s hull. (In fact, an armored hull was considered undesirable; the increased weight would make a ship ride lower in the water, reducing its speed and its fuel efficiency.) As a consequence, in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, every warship in the world was vulnerable to torpedo attack.

Nineteenth-century Sailors found the very idea of the torpedo both insulting and terrifying. They began to refer to Whitehead’s invention as the Devil’s Device. Many prominent naval officers condemned the machine as a barbarous method of warfare. After all, war at sea was a gentleman’s game, and a device that slipped in under a ship’s armor wasn’t a very far cry from a punch below the belt. It could hardly be considered the weapon of an honorable man.

Luckily (for its detractors), Whitehead’s torpedo had a lot of problems.

Early models had difficulty maintaining their depth in the water. A torpedo that rose too high in the water would impact on a ship’s armor, which might well absorb the explosion without serious damage. A torpedo that ran too deep would pass under the target ship’s hull and miss it completely. To make matters worse, since Whitehead’s